Safari and Chrome both do the same thing as Firefox here and clone the state of the element without any value changes. Opera and IE clone current state of the control, including any value changes. Fun…

This is similar to #1736 (if not an outright dup) and seems equally difficult to fix in a general way. If someone needs the partial input typed by a user at the point of cloning it would make more sense to copy over the .value at that point. If someone has a better idea let us know.

I need this because I simulate nested forms by cloning parts of a big form, wrapping them in their own form, and submitting. I'm going to have to use @jakobbhilden's approach (thanks!).

My feeling is that if cloning other elements and getting their values works as expected, so should it word for textareas. So yes, the value should be copied when the element is cloned. Otherwise, it's simply not a "clone".

Wierd bug... I'd suggest this should be fixed not because I'm lazy but because as others have said it's inconsistent behaviour when compared to how clone() handles other elements.
clone() should clone, not clone most of it but leave little bits out here and there. Also the current clone() man page doesn't make any mention of this behaviour, which could be confusing.

I consider this a bug that should remain open, as others have said. I don't know the ins and outs of jQuery's clone function, but this was my workaround,...

I simply set all textarea values within the "to-be-cloned" container into an obscurely-named "data-" attribute of each area before the clone, then restored the area values from the attributes immediately after (and removed the obscurely-named attribute). Sure, there's a performance/memory penalty but well worth it for all of my uses.

My use case involves cloning but not appending: the user is filling out a form which, when saved to the database, will be used to create a printable document. They can preview the document at any time. To generate the preview, I clone the form, set its action and target so that it will update an iframe with the printable version, and call .submit().

I believe that this bug is still in place. I was trying to clone divs from one form to another. All of the inputs were using the current value, but the textarea wasn't. In my case, I was able to just use appendTo instead of clone, but I think this is something that should be looked at.

The current behavior is documented at api.jquery.com and of course here. A plugin is available to provide the requested behavior. The ticket is marked patchwelcome, with the caveat that fixing this edge case inside jQuery causes a performance hit for the 90% of the time when it isn't needed.